


The Great Maybe

by howardently



Category: My Mad Fat Diary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-17
Updated: 2015-06-17
Packaged: 2018-04-04 19:38:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4150296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/howardently/pseuds/howardently





	The Great Maybe

This is what it must feel like to be psychic; the churning of your stomach, twisting itself around an impossible future it knows to be true. The sickness somehow sweetening the tartness of hope, a sour contrast that lies like bile on your tongue.

They’ve been dancing around it for weeks. He’s been pining; he knows it’s nothing other than pining. He’s been moody, melancholy, all wide eyes and longing. He listens to the music now and it hurts. It sticks in his head, prickling burrs that sting but he can’t seem to pry them out. Or maybe he doesn’t want to pry them out.

There’s one song, more than the others. Every time he hears it, his chest seems to close up, his body wanting to tighten in over his fragile, vulnerable heart. It makes him wonder if his ribs can actually contract, if the crackling that accompanies the backbeat is the shifting of his bones rather than an instrument. His body playing a song of longing in perfect time with the tune.

So he listens to it every night for a month. From the first hint that it’s her, that he’s lost to something great that swells with the tides, he can’t seem to help it. It moors him, ties him down with the stinging. He hums it under his breath, plays it loud in his room, carries it around in his headphones like a secret. The hurt that belongs to her is somehow a good hurt, a pain that makes him more. He’s better with the words under his tongue, the drumming keeping the pace of his heart when it chases after her.

But it can’t sustain, he knows. It’s a fragile ecosystem, one that will invariably collapse in on itself if it stays inert. His blood can’t feed the wanting forever; it’s too heavy, too greedy. He’s not enough to feed it on his own. It needs her.

He sees it in colors; it’s too big for his brain to label and reduce with language. So it’s hues, shades of desire and ache and fear.

Wanting her is blue. It’s the denim beneath his fingers as he traces his intent onto her leg. It’s the sky as they spill from the pub, head swimming from her proximity as much as from the beer. It’s the dimness of his room as he lies awake and listens to the same song on repeat, longing for something that he can’t quite understand.

The uncertainty is the mottled black of a bruise, pulsing beneath his skin with an unrelenting ache. She doesn’t want you. You aren’t good enough for her. Her attentions are elsewhere. You’ll never be enough. When she pushes him away, it’s the curtain of her hair across the room where she gives herself to someone else. It’s the way the light gets sucked out of the cupboard when she says she doesn’t even want to be his friend. It’s the back of her jacket, around corners and down streets he can’t follow.

The flirtation is purple; magenta and red velvet. It’s the way the room blurs dizzyingly when his eyes catch hers and hold just a second too long and she doesn’t look away. It’s the hue of her lips when he catches a smile that’s for him but not meant to be seen by him. It’s the suffocation he feels when he reaches for her hand, the air suddenly nowhere to be found. It’s the humming of his blood when she bites her lip.

The hope is yellow, pale spring sun and beer warmed by his hand when she’s been talking and he forgets everything else. It’s the first rays of dawn when he’s been up all night planning what he’ll say. It’s the kettle when she’s shown up at his, upset and turning to him instead of the others. It’s the nicotine stains on his fingers when she thinks he can’t see her watching the curls of smoke that he makes just for her.

But tonight, it’s all the colors at once. Muted, bright, a rainbow of emotions spilling out from every surface, like he can suddenly see a spectrum that’s out of range for everyone else. The trees bleed tangerine into the receding afternoon, a trail that follows behind them as they speed toward a conclusion. Her fingers against his jacket trail sparkles of pale pink, and he’s bolstered by the speckles and pops that flicker within it. The static of her hair as he pulls of the helmet, cerulean. Her hand when he holds it over the handlebars with the weight of his certainty, wine and burgundy.

When Chloe says that they look like a couple, it’s a flare of bright gold that sends a sonic wave radiating through the fields around them, a pulse that shakes the leaves and quakes the earth, overturns the air into something new.

Tonight’s the night.


End file.
